X is Dead; Long Live X

Whenever you hear an announcement, pronouncement, or prognostication concerning the "death" of something, you can be assured that one of roughly four things is actually the case. The first -- and rarest -- is that the thing in question actually is "dead". Thus, the "death of fascism", which was certified by the end of World War II, really was a bonafide death. Which is to say, fascism _as a political/economic system_ did not survive World War II and the defeat of its primary exponents, i.e. Italy and Germany. What _did_ survive, of course, is the use of "fascism" as a scare word. But that has degenerated so badly from overuse that it has lost all meaning. For example, if opposition to affirmative action equals "fascism", then we have nothing more than a short-hand term for "something I don't like". So I could go into a candy store and pronounce the marshmallow peanuts "fascist" if I happened not to care for them. That's about as much actual meaning as the term has these days. Now, of course, this has not stopped politicians and pundits all across the spectrum from pronouncing our alleged enemies on the world stage alternatively "terrorists" or "Islamo-fascists". As to the former term, "terrorism" most commonly refers to (1) people we don't like, who (2) wage unconventional warfare. People we _do_ like who wage unconventional warfare are, of course, anything but terrorists. They might be "freedom fighters", "counter-insurgents", or part of a "democratic uprising", or even "anti-fascists". But the term will always be one of esteem. On the other hand, people we don't like who wage _conventional_ warfare are an irritant, but we can at least pay them the grudging respect that they are playing by the rules. And as to the latter term ("Islamo-fascism"), I doubt very much if a bunch of bearded guys in bathrobes living in caves and drinking tea laced with camel's milk have consciously embarked on a campaign of political fascism, with all of its quite involved (contrary to stereotype) social and economic programs. These are simple men, after all, and their strength is that they believe, and ruthlessly act upon, one main idea at a time. The idea they are acting on at present is that the U.S., and its troops, and its customs, businesses, representatives, agents, and lackeys must all be driven out of the Middle East, once and for all, and that Israel, which they see as the illegitimate offspring of Western Europe and the United States, must be crushed into fine power. And once that is accomplished, they will sit down over tea (and camel's milk) and decide what the next main idea is going to be. (It could be to Islamicize Europe, but that will already be an accomplished fact by then.)

So what we have in the case of "fascism" is something that really is dead, but the term has such high impact that it has been retained as an all-purpose scare word, used primarily as a way leftists can say they just don't like rightists, but say it in such a way that it sounds like they're making a serious statement about political theory and practice. In fact, you can be assured that if fascism really _had_ survived World War II, you wouldn't have every idiot in town mouthing the term, because the real thing would be available for comparison. As it is, there is very little living memory of bonafide fascism, so we can use the word any way we like and no one is the wiser.

As a side note -- it's also the case that, for everything that could reasonably be declared "dead", there are vested interests in keeping it alive -- or in, at least, keeping alive the myth that whatever it is is still an imminent threat, and vast amounts of effort and government funding must be expended to combat it. Familiar examples of this "not so fast!" category are: Racism (on the part of whites, of course), Sexism (especially the mythical "glass ceiling"), and Homophobia. Behaviors that have been legislated out of existence for decades, in some cases, and the associated attitudes, which are mercilessly pounced upon and severely sanctioned whenever they threaten to spring up -- these are still considered to be barely contained, and almost at the breaking point -- again, for the purposes, among others, of creating never-ending government programs, entitlements, and lucrative jobs for "experts", "facilitators", "counselors", and other parasites, not to mention the academically-vapid college and university programs whose names all end with the word "Studies". (Someone once commented that if a program would sound absurd if the word "Mathematics" was substituted for the word "Studies", then it is, in fact, absurd. Try it! It's fun!)

Now we come to the second meaning of "X is dead", which is "we know darn well it isn't, but gosh, wouldn't it be nice if it was?" So George Bush consigns communism to the "ash-heap of history". Well, someone better tell Hugo Chavez, and his buddies all over Latin America. Someone better tell rebel bands all over Africa and East Asia. What the "ash-heap" theory fails to take into account is that communism's appeal is not simply based on passing economic or political situations. It represents a profound state of mind, which, in turn, reflects a serious and recurring flaw in human nature. (For an excellent discussion of this and myriad other points, see Whittaker Chambers' "Witness".) So much for wishful thinking. As soon as we declare something dead, it springs up again. In fact, it's even more likely that the reason we go out of our way to declare it dead is that it's _already_ springing up, and we feel that by reciting incantations and casting spells, we can keep it from happening. That would be nice, but it simply doesn't work.

Thirdly, we have things that are declared dead, or at least "ended", and the main motive for this seems to be that, once you have decided that something has ended, you can go ahead and write a book about it without being afraid that the book will be obsolete a week after it's published. So we had the infamous "The End of History" by Francis Fukuyama, who, if he had had any humility, would have declared that this was his last book, and he would have stuck to it. But hey, a guy's gotta make a living, right? So now he writes about what happened since the end, which is sort of like Stephen Hawking writing about what happened before the beginning. Now, if he had titled the book "A Slight Pause in History", that would have actually been quite accurate to describe the period between the Soviet breakup and 9-11, when even the president of "the sole superpower" could while away afternoons dallying with nubile interns in the White House hot tub. But a book by that title would not have sold any copies. And for that matter, the Cold War hasn't ended either; it's just morphed into a different form -- away from the political and theoretical and more toward the economic, controlling resources, and manipulating markets.

Finally, we have the example of two columns that both came out just last week, one contending that "liberalism is dead" and the other that "conservatism is dead". Well, if this is so, then what on earth are the presidential candidates fighting about? Have we all been politically neutered at this point? No, it's not a matter of anything being "dead" -- it's more like the _living_dead. Which means, both liberalism and conservatism (as represented by the Neocons, at least) have lost their cutting edge. They have faded into the background clutter and are no longer capable of inspiring anybody based on their _ideas_ -- although they can still motivate people when they appeal to baser motives like greed, envy, resentment, fear, the lust for power, etc. When an idea is absorbed into the baseline culture to such an extent that it no longer stands out, it may be described as dead in a sense. But in another sense, it is very much alive, in that everyone is used to it, and it's taken for granted. Yesterday's "radicalism" is today's standard procedure. (Ironically, when liberals accuse conservatives of trying to "turn back the clock" what they are really saying is "Don't make our ideas 'radical' again. Keep them in place as the established and accepted way of doing things." In other words, the _real_ "conservatives" of our time are the liberals.)

Another familiar quality of ideas that become so accepted that they are no longer thought of as "ideas" is their tendency to regress to the mean, i.e. to more and more approach, or accommodate themselves to, the actual habits of the people. So we have, at this point, a nexus of "liberalism" and "conservatism" whereby there is very little difference between them in terms of application, the conceptual differences having long since been lost in the everyday shuffle of people trying to get more out of the system than they put into it. And it is this convergence that becomes the new "establishment", and that acts as a single organism when it is threatened, as witness the reaction to the Ron Paul campaign. Both "sides" of the current election struggle took time out to lob their largest-caliber shells at Ron Paul. He was more of a threat to the Neocons, for example, than were either Hillary or Obama. And we see that when liberalism, or conservatism, are pronounced "dead", it may hold true on the operational level, and even to some extent on the theoretical level, but it doesn't hold true on the psychological level, i.e. in the clouded minds of their respective adherents, "liberalism" and "conservatism" still have salience, as do their respective iconography and symbolism. They are still accorded the reverence and devotion that were formerly reserved for religious movements. And they get their residual strength from the fact that they still appeal to people on the most primitive levels, having to do, I'm certain, with things like toilet training (for conservatives -- bad) and weaning (for liberals -- way too soon) -- if you'll accept a bit of gratuitous Freudianism! So there will always be "liberalism" and "conservatism", but the energy of those movements may be confined, more and more, to what is going on in people's heads rather than what is actually happening in the real world.